Tag: brazilians

The Brazilian samba school: Delivering high performance with happiness!

Management the Brazilian Way

Many foreign corporations dealing with Brazilians complain about low productivity, poor communication, high turnover and lack of engagement. Yet, at samba schools, Brazilian members show the opposite, and for no pay too!

Online course

This is an online course in English addressed to business people who work with Brazilians.

To show what is missing at corporate management Alfredo Behrens has researched and interviewed at samba schools. He has elicited the people management practices and leadership styles that can be implemented at corporations to achieve higher profitability with greater happiness. Much of the course is drawn from subtitled interviews with genuine samba school members and can be easily transferred to corporations, like recruiting, selection and promotion techniques, even compensation ones, though samba schools do not pay members.

High performance with happiness can be achieved in Brazil following the samba school method of management!

The self-paced course is designed for executives. It consists of 14 lectures but they are short: 7 minutes each. They can be fitted between phone calls if necessary. Altogether we are talking of just over one and a half hours of lectures. Each lecture comes with additional reading material and quizzes to measure the participants’ understanding. The course will remain free, for sure, until November 14, when all 14 lectures will have been completed. At present only the wrap-up lecture is missing. But you can fully benefit for free from the rest, 13 out of 14 lectures! That is all there is between you and success!Management the Brazilian Way can be found here. Once there you may click on This course and you will be taken to the course´s landing page, enrol free, no credit card asked, and start learning.

In below video, sponsored by the Dutch Brazilian Chamber of Commerce you will get an idea of the course content.

About Alfredo Behrens

Alfredo Behrens holds a PhD by the University of Cambridge, has taught at Princeton University and is an expert on Cross-Cultural Management and Leadership, which he lectures on at FIA, the São Paulo business school. His book ‘Culture and Management in the Americas’ is published by Stanford University Press. Another book: ‘Shooting Heroes and Rewarding Cowards’ is praised by Suzy Welch, the former Editor-In-Chief of Harvard Business Review as ‘Fascinating and Innovative’.

As emerging powers like China are seeking to strengthen innovation-driven growth and focus on the production of value-added goods, they are increasingly trying to emulate the United States’ unique capacity to attract foreign talent. Indeed, the competition for high-end talent is set to become a major international battleground as nations around the world try to avoid being left behind as eternal commodity providers, unable to achieve long-term growth.

A brief look at the statistics shows the massive impact immigrants have on the US economy’s capacity to innovate and generate jobs: Some 40% of Fortune 500 firms were founded by immigrants or their children. So were the firms behind seven of the ten most valuable brands in the world. Although the foreign-born are only an eighth of the US population, a quarter of high-tech start-ups have an immigrant founder. Apple, Google, AT&T, Budweiser, Colgate, eBay, General Electric, IBM, McDonalds, owe their origin to a founder who was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is a child of an immigrant parent from Syria. Walt Disney also was the child of an immigrant (from Canada), as well as the founders of Oracle (Russia and Iran), IBM (Germany), Clorox (Ireland), Boeing (Germany) 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).

High-tech firms such as Google (whose co-founder Sergey Brin moved to America from Russia as a child) haven’t just created jobs for their own workers. They have also inspired the creation of entirely new categories of job. A few years ago no one earned a living as a mobile-app developer. Now they are everywhere. It is not just full-time workers who benefit: firms such as oDesk, a Silicon Valley outfit founded by two Greeks, are nurturing an online freelance economy that is in its infancy. Last year Americans using oDesk’s platform found over 2 million hours of freelance work.Continue reading

Six percent IOF tax exempted from foreign loans

Dilma Rousseff

The Brazilian administration is rolling back curbs on foreign capital imposed in the past 19 months after the real posted the biggest loss of any major currency this year.

The government exempted foreign loans which matures in more than than two years from a 6 percent tax to help companies and banks rollover debt, said Finance Minister Guido Mantega. The financial transaction tax was before charged on loans taken abroad maturing as many as five years.

The tax was one of a series of measures taken to weaken the real and protect exporters from what Rousseff dubbed “a monetary tsunami” unleashed by rich nations seeking to devalue their currencies. Mantega said today that the “excessive liquidity” that led to capital controls ended with the worsening of the European debt crisis.

“Before the crisis worsened, it was easier to have access to long-term credit,” Mantega told reporters in Brasília. Brazilian banks and companies “need to rollover loans taken in the past, and this makes it easier.”

After being the best performing major currency in the first two months of the year, the real reversed course and plunged, raising concern the move could stoke inflation as imports became more expensive.

Growth Forecasts and GDP review

Economists covering the Brazilian economy reduced their 2012 economic growth forecast for a fifth straight week on June 8. The world’s biggest emerging market after China will expand 2.53 percent this year, less than the 2.73 percent growth rate posted last year, according to the median estimate in a central bank survey of about 100 analysts. GDP Preview: The IBC-BR recorded a high of 0.22% in April compared to March, which means that the economy is growing again. The above data was reviewed. In March, a drop was 0.61%, in February, up 0.56% and in January, down 0.38%.

New stimulus package

Government announced a further package – The government today announced a line of credit to the states, through BNDES, which can reach $ 20 billion. Expectations are that the new credit lines increase investment to stimulate the economy.

Agriculture Committee of the House of Representatives approves purchase of agricultural land by foreigners

The Agriculture Committee of the House of Representatives approved on Wednesday (13th of June 2012) the text of the bill that allows the acquisition of large plots of land by Brazilian companies controlled by foreigners. Today, the actual limit is up to 100 “fiscal units” (módulos ficais).

Fiscal unit is a unit of land measurement used in Brazil. It is expressed in hectares and is variable and is determined for each municipality, taking into account:

main type of farming in the municipality;

proceeds from the exploitation prevalent;

other farms in the municipality which, although not predominant, are expressive function of income or area used;

concept of family property.

Today, by law, foreign companies can buy up to 5 000 hectares, never exceeding 25% of the municipal area of the location of the farm. Citizens of the same foreign nationality can not together have more than 10% of the area of a municipality.

The text proposes that Brazilian companies with foreign capital are treated as domestic companies, no limit for land acquisition. The companies and foreign people, who currently limit the acquisition of 100 and 50 fiscal modules, respectively, can now acquire up to one quarter of the municipality where the farm.

The proposal also eliminates the authorization or license from the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) for acquisition by foreigners of rural property tax of up to four modules and rental tax of up to ten modules. The legislation established the current limit of three modules operating indefinitely.

Non-governmental organizations

The acquisition of land by non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) with foreign capital or headquarters outside of Brazil, which is not mentioned in current law, is prohibited in the new proposal. Upon approval, the report will be turned into a bill and distributed to other committees for analysis, then, be voted on in Congress.

“CNN says that Mark is saddened by the behavior of the Brazilian at Facebook”

The news channel CNN said that the behavior of the Brazilians on the social network site Facebook is saddening Mark Zuckerberg. “On the one hand, Brazilians are growing Facebook, however they ruin everything,” he said.

Facebook engineers were considering allowing the inclusion of images in the format animated GIF-pictures (moving images), but Mark refused the idea because he has seen the behaviour of Brazilians at the social network site Orkut, which is loaded wioth animated gif’s.

According to Mark, if Facebook make room for the gifs, sharing among users will be equal to the Brazilian Orkut, full of colorful moving letters, loaded with messages of affection and love.

Closing Facebook in Brazil

On the possibility of closing the Facebook in Brazil, Mark drops . “I will not blame the Brazilians use the network, but will create a manual of behavior.”

When asked about Facebook is turning into a Orkut in Brazil, Mark said that there is no difference between social networks, the difference is Who uses. “Any service that has the Internet users in Brazil, in large proportions, it becomes a problem,” he said.

[important]

Source: G17.com.br

Note of the editor: This article has been published in Portuguese on the site G17.com.br. So, please don’t take this serious. It has been republished by many serious news websites in Brazil. However, for those of you intending to do business and want to learn about the culture you might be interested to read the various comments been made by the readers.

Over the last decade, Brazil has become fertile source for creativity and disruptive business models. The innovation revolution is alive both among start-ups and among the thousands of Brazilian multinationals. A new report from INSEAD and the OECD Development Centre argues that by developing new business models, “in several revealing cases, Brazilian businesses are redefining global business”.

Bug Agentes Biológicos mass-produces wasps to combat larvae and stinkbugs that threaten sugarcane and soybean plants, two of Brazil’s largest cash crops. This past year, Bug perfected a way to spray its wasps onto soy fields, just as pesticides are spread via airplane. “We can liberate the insects in the right dose, at the right speed, and with the right protection so they can be effective,” says Francisco Jardim, a Brazilian VC who has invested in Bug and sits on its board. Wasps, for example, need to be protected until their wings grow big enough for flight, or else ants present a threat. (Isn’t nature grand?)

Bug’s timing feels right. Brazil is the world’s third-largest agricultural exporter (behind the United States and EU); it recently passed the U.S. as the largest consumer of pesticides. Yet the country has begun to phase out the more noxious chemical pesticides Brazilian farmers use despite diminishing effectiveness. Bug has the only alternative approved by Brazilian agricultural, health, and environmental ministries. It’s currently at 100% capacity with plans in 2012 to double the acreage it covers.

The boo-box is the largest Internet advertising technology in Latin America. An ad network that offers innovative solutions targeting technology and different formats of advertisements for the web. In their network appears around 3 billion ads per month. Boo-box has more than 40,000 affiliate publishers that produce content every day on their blogs, websites and social network profiles. The subjects dealt with by our publishers are the most diverse, for all tastes and audiences: automotive, beauty, food, health, tourism, and more. There are 310,000 websites and blogs in total, and 23 000 profiles Twitter! All this great content attracts audience: more than 80 million people per month, equivalent to 100% of Internet users in Brazil. People interested in staying on top of all that is happening on the internet and the world. technology of boo-box bridges the gap between advertisers who want to communicate with this audience, and publishers that offer advertising space on their websites and blogs.

The Brazilian advertising network exploded last year, quintupling the number of ads it placed to reach some 80% of its home country’s web users. The key, says founder Marco Gomes, is creating novel ad formats “where people are already paying attention,” such as in Twitter feeds or blog text. Next up: targeting all of Latin America. “There’s a lot of room to grow,” says Gomes, citing a recent merger with Argentine semantics firm Popego. “The car isn’t the center of our culture anymore, it’s the computer.

3 – EBX

For bringing fresh dirt. Brazil’s march toward self-sufficiency got an extra push from EBX this year. Grupo EBX’s Acu Superport, originally dreamed up as a “highway” to send raw goods to China, will now include a compound capable of holding 3 million tons of nitrogen-enriched fertilizer a year. Acu’s infrastructure can shuttle the resource to Brazil’s three major regions responsible for 87% of the country’s agricultural output.

For going where the clients are. Brazil’s largest IT services company cemented its global presence by expanding further into fellow emerging economy and outsourcing powerhouse, China. Stefanini also has designs on making inroads in Japan: Its new software development center is located in Jilin , a city in China that has a large Japanese-speaking population.

For serving and protecting its country. New ventures into defense and security will pay off for the world’s fourth-largest aircraft manufacturer and its home country. Embraer has its eyes set on building Brazil’s first geostationary satellite, a move that will boost the country’s communication, remote imaging, and weather prediction capabilities.

Petrobras has operations in the entire oil and gas productive chain and in the production of biofuels and of other alternative energy sources.

Petrobras recently made the biggest oil discoveries in Brazil in the pre-salt layer located between the states of Santa Catarina and Espírito Santo, where major volumes of light oil were found.

The first results indicate very large volumes. Just to have an idea, the Tupi accumulation alone, located in the Santos Basin, has recoverable volumes estimated at 5 to 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent (oil plus gas). Meanwhile, the Guará well, also in the Santos Basin, holds 1.1 to 2 billion barrels of light oil and natural gas.

For shoring up innovation in the Gulf of Mexico, post-Deepwater Horizon. This year, Petrobras received long-awaited U.S. Interior regulatory approval for the first floating deepwater oil and natural gas production and storage facility in the Gulf, positioning it to lead other energy companies toward what’s being billed as a safe new way to tap into natural resources. Located 165 miles off the Louisiana coastline, Petrobras’ Chinook-Cascade facility’s mobility makes it stand out from typical fixed platform sites; it can be unhooked and moved out of the path of hurricanes to avoid long-term oil shortages. The project has 600,000 barrels of oil storage capacity and can process 80,000 barrels per day.

For opening the app marketplace to web developers. São Paulo-based Predicta launched SiteApps in April 2011 as a platform for easy-to-use website optimization. Developers can post their free or paid apps on the site; users can then install the tool (from analytics to social media widgets) onto their websites.

For defining the way Brazil does local. Apontador has long moved away from its mapping roots to become the top geolocation service company in Brazil. In 2011 it rolled out Apontador+, a feature that lets businesses create pages on the site to see how Apontador users (more than 12 million a month) interact with their brand.

For bringing radio to gaming. Fresh from a copyright infringement settlement with Zynga, Vostu soldiers on as the first company to incorporate radio into its social gaming. Users can now hear Brazilian pop hits and gaming advice instead of canned music and sound effects while building farms and cities on its popular games MiniFazenda and MegaCity. Listeners can also earn rewards by completing in-game missions promoted on the station.

Carnaval is over, the Lion is coming

After having celebrated New Year and Carnaval it is now time to start the year really. As per today you can fill out and submit your income tax.

Up to April 30th to declare your income to the Brazilian tax authorities

This year, the application to fill out your income tax declaration has been available before March 1st 2012. According to the Receita Federal, anticipating the release of the application to facilitate the lives of those who need to state, helping to get familiar with the program. With this, the Receita Federal changes the system that prevailed in recent years, when it was available only on the day that began officially the delivery of application for the income tax. However, informs the Receita Federal, people have to wait until 8am on 1st March to send the statement, even if they fill out the form in advance. The deadline for submission is 23:59 on 30 April this year.

For this reason, it is good to be aware. “Whoever fails to deliver is subject to a fine for delay, calculated as follows: there is tax due, the fine will be 1% per calendar month or fraction thereof of delay, incident on what is owed, even if fully paid, subject to the minimum values ??of R $ 165.74 and a maximum of 20% of this tax. However, there being nothing to pay, the fine will be R $ 165.74, “warns the tax expert Richard Domingue, CEO of Confirp Accounting.

To facilitate the life of the taxpayer, MasterclassBrazil today brings a series of articles on the IRPF. Know who is obliged to declare, how to send the document, which models and how not to fall into the fine mesh.

After ten days of touring Southern Brazil in early February, 34 U.S. farmers from 10 states came away very impressed with this country’s agricultural potential, despite the drought that withered crops on most of the farms we visited.

As expected more and more countries are lining up to challenge the unreasonable protective measure by the Brazilian government to increase the Tax on Industrialised Products (IPI). Last month, Brazil raised the so-called IPI by 30 percentage points for imported cars that aren’t made with at least 65% local content. Excluded are those from companies that produce locally or in Mercosul partners. Established carmakers such as Volkswagen, Fiat,General Motors Co. and Ford, which together account for about three-fourths of car sales, had complained about the influx of cars as Brazil’s currency strengthened and demand jumped.

Japan may be the first country to challenge at the World Trade Organization the Brazilian this increase in the IPI tax. In addition to Japan, South Korea also objected to the increase for imported cars decided by the Brazilian government. The two countries that are producers of automobiles, said that Brazil violates the agreement of trade-related investments as well as an article of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on national treatment of companies.

Both Korea and Japan has decided to challenge the measure of the Brazilian government in the Market Access Committee , which periodically examines new barriers raised by the countries. The report itself noted that the Japanese action could pave the way for other governments complain of Brazil, as it did. Japan will ask judges at the WTO to examine the measure. Though most Japanese car makers produce locally, exempting them from the tax, the country’s government is concerned that a similar measure could be repeated by other countries. The issue was raised with Brazil during a meeting of the WTO’s market access committee on Friday, said Atsushi Saito, Japan’s representative at the Geneva-based organization. In addition to Japan, members from South Korea, Australia, Europe and the U.S. also voiced their concerns, Saito said. When asked if Japan planned to file a formal complain with the WTO, Saito replied in an email that “If you understand that ‘formal complaint’ is part of a dispute settlement process, we don’t have any plans at this stage.”

More than 20% of cars sold this year are imported, up from just 5% in 2005, according to automakers association Anfavea. But the tax hike was challenged by car companies who are building or plan to build factories in the country and who say that because they won’t be able to meet the full local content requirements during the first few years of operations, they would cancel plans to bring production onshore.

Government willing to negotiate?

The government has since said it would negotiate with those companies to reach a compromise. This is also confirmed by China’s JAC Motors. JAC Brazil says it has finalized a deal to build a $500 million car factory in Brazil. JAC Brazil says in an emailed release the factory will be built in the northeastern state of Bahia. The plant should be ready by 2014.The automaker said in August it wanted to build a factory in Brazil. But those plans were questioned after Brazil hiked the import taxes on foreign cars, threatening the Chinese-made vehicles JAC ships to Brazil. JAC says in its Friday statement it hopes the decision to invest will convince officials to scrap that tax hike.

BMW considers building a factory in the country, but..

BMW asked Brazil’s Trade and Development Minister Fernando Pimentel to reevaluate the increase in the IPI tax as it considers building a factory in the country, O Estado de S. Paulo reported, citing Henning Dornbusch, chief executive officer of BMW’s Brazil unit. The Brazilian government’s decision to raise the tax on cars with less than 65 percent of their parts produced in Brazil may lead BMW to build its plant in China, India or Russia instead, according to the newspaper. The company will announce its decision by November, O Estado said. The Ministry of Trade and Development’s press office said Pimentel hasn’t made any commitment relating to BMW’s request because the decision must be made in conjunction with Finance Minister Guido Mantega, O Estado said.

The Apple founder Steve Jobs, died without seeing his company operate normally in Brazil. The he is rightly being hailed as a revolutionary genius who transformed the way we sell and consume culture and technology. That’s a lot. But one thing he could accomplish was to make his business occupy the space it deserves in the phenomenal Brazilian market. And that says a lot more about Brazil than Jobs.

To date, Apple products are commercialized by third parties in Brazil, as the American company was unable to develop a viable business model in the homeland of the high taxes and poor business environment.

Brazilians pay double or more than Americans for an Ipad created by Jobs and his team. The last stand for the normalization of the action here was Apple’s announcement, over hyped to say the least, the construction of an IPad factory here.

The announcement came during Rousseff’s trip to China in April. In the absence of any tangible result of the visit, it was announced with great fanfare and no substance that Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that manufactures iPads would open a new factory in Brazil to produce them here. It was what Dilma and PT needed to capture the emerging middle class in the country.

As I wrote here at that time, Apple cannot sell its products in Brazil because of its poor economic conditions, called on the Taiwanese company that manufactures and iPods, IPads in China to produce them here and so get around the precarious economic environment and still be sold as an asset of Dilma’s visit to China. There is the “spin”!

The factory as of today is still obviously a promise. First there was talk of initial production in November, then that BNDES would finance the US$ 12 billion investment, then came the talk that there was no skilled labor in the country to implement the project, then start the operation would begin with Mexican “maquiladoras” only assembling the products here.

The fact is that Steve Jobs is dead, and Brazil is still largely excluded the Apple revolution. While we continue with one of the most expensive and slowest internet connections in the world.

These are the things that explain why we are behind despite the huge advances in recent years, and our dependence on blessed commodities, which without them we would have disastrous trade deficits.

If Jobs was able to transform so much, who knows that maybe this commotion with his death will illuminates the heads of our bureaucrats and accelerate liberalization of the Brazilian market and digital technology.

Taxing technology is taxing knowledge, innovation and the future. It closed the borders to Steve Jobs.

Article by Sérgio Malbergier, Folha de São Paulo, published on Expatbrazil

Sergio Malbergier is a journalist. He was editor of the special money section of Folha (Dinheiro – 2004-2010) and Mundo (2000-2004), correspondent in London (1994) and Special Envoy for Folha in Iraq, Israel and Venezuela, among others. He has directed two short films, A Árvore (The Tree -1986) and Carô no Inferno (Dear Hell – 1987). He write for Folha.com on Thursdays.